Female Focus

In February, Linux and open source enthusiasts met in southern California for SCALE 6x. The conference kicked off with a day of "Friday Special Events," including a Women in Open Source conference.

At the 2008 Southern California Linux Expo, female attendees received a ladies' t-shirt in their attendee bags – a small gesture, but also a first in my experience. On Friday, February 8th, I attended the Women in Open Source conference (Figure 1), a loosely organized event with eight speakers. Allison Randall's first talk, "The Art of Conference Presentations," proved to be a hard act to follow because she suggested some best practices for speaking and slide show preparation.

In the afternoon, Stormy Peters spoke to a full room of men and women in her talk "What Does a Community Manager Do?" Later, Drupal's Angela Byron talked about building websites with Drupal and suggested that creating clear project documentation provides the best way to "skyrocket your karma points" in an open source community.

The final talk, Danese Cooper's "Why Whinging It Doesn't Work," covered accenting the positives about women in open source rather than focusing on the problems. Danese then moderated our WOIS panel discussion at the end of the day (Figure 1). If you don't want to miss out on SCALE 7x, sign up for email updates [1].